The Scepter's Return

by Harry Turtledove

  “Yes, Your Majesty!” Several officers saluted and dashed off to do Lanius’ bidding. Was it just that they wanted to make sure to seem loyal? Or was it that, since he could handle the Scepter and Ortalis couldn’t, no one doubted he was the only legitimate king? It looked that way to him.

  The guards officers who hadn’t raced away in one direction or another escorted Lanius to the throne room. Servants bowed or curtsied as they passed him. “Your Majesty!” they murmured. They sounded much more sincere than usual. Had news traveled so fast? One of them said, “Much better you than Ortalis, Your Majesty!” so evidently it had.

  After Lanius sat on the Diamond Throne, the men in his escort bowed low. He wondered if they would knock their heads on the floor for him, the way supplicants were said to do at the courts of some of the Menteshe princes. To his relief, they didn’t.

  Hirundo reached the throne room before Pterocles. He too bowed himself double before Lanius. “Your Majesty!” the general said, and then, “Am I to understand you’re His only Majesty right this minute?”

  “So it would seem,” Lanius answered. “How does that sit with you?”

  He tried not to show that he worried about the answer. Hirundo was popular with the soldiers. If he wanted a crown for himself, he had a real chance of taking it. But he said, “Suits me fine. I’ve always been loyal to the dynasty, and I don’t aim to quit now.”

  “Good. Thank you,” Lanius said.

  “So Ortalis couldn’t make the Scepter work for him, eh?” Hirundo said, and shook his head without waiting for an answer. “Can’t tell you I’m very surprised. Never a whole lot of what you’d call mercy in him.”

  “No, I’m afraid not,” Lanius agreed.

  “What happens next?” Hirundo asked. “Are you going to bring Grus out of the Maze?”

  “I … don’t know.” Lanius had wondered about that, too. He was saved from saying more when Pterocles came up to the throne and bowed to him. He nodded to the wizard. “Ah. Here you are.”

  “Here I am indeed, Your Majesty.” Pterocles bowed again. “Very much at your service, I might add. I’ve tried to stay out of the way the past few days—”

  “So have I, as a matter of fact,” Hirundo broke in. “Wasn’t so much worried about Ortalis, you understand, as I was about some of the young pups who ran with him. They might have wanted to see if they could bite an old hound’s backside, and he wouldn’t have told ’em it wasn’t a good idea.…”

  “No,” Lanius said. “I don’t suppose he would.”

  “But the wizard’s right,” Hirundo said. “We are at your service, Your Majesty. Better yours—much better yours—than his.” He did not name Ortalis, not this time, but then, he had no need to.

  “Much better yours,” Pterocles agreed. “I wondered if the Scepter would put up with him. Since it didn’t … well, that says everything that needs saying, doesn’t it?”

  “Everyone thinks so,” Lanius said. “I don’t think we’ll ever see another king who can’t pick it up.” Had that been so before the Menteshe seized the Scepter? He couldn’t remember reading anything in the archives that said it had. But then, would birds have written in detail of the air through which they flew? The chroniclers of bygone days must have felt the same about the Scepter of Mercy. Why go on about what everybody already knew?

  Sounding apologetic for being so persistent, Hirundo asked, “Uh, Your Majesty, what are you going to do about Grus?”

  At almost the same instant, Pterocles asked, “What are you going to do about Ortalis, Your Majesty?”

  “I don’t have to make up my mind about Grus right away,” Lanius answered, and he knew more than a little relief when both the general and the wizard nodded with him. He went on, “I know exactly what to do with Ortalis, though.…”

  Ortalis slumped against the side of a boat. He would have said there were few worse postures in which to fall asleep—and he would have been right. But when exhaustion pressed, posture mattered less than he would have imagined possible. And so, despite the awkward position, despite the musty smells of the Maze all around him—and some of those smells worse than merely musty, too—sleep he did.

  No sooner had he fallen asleep than he also fell into a dream. It was, he saw at once, one of those dreams, the dreams that seemed brighter, realer, truer than mere mundane reality. This dream, unlike the ones that had gone before, did not paint a whole world. No, all he saw was a face.

  But what a face!—inhumanly calm, inhumanly cold, inhumanly beautiful. And the voice that came from the face was the Voice that had urged him on to the kingship … for a little while. “You failed me,” the Voice said.

  Instead of warming Ortalis, praising him, pushing him to do great things, the Voice made him feel even smaller, even worse, than he had before. “It’s not my fault,” he whined. “I did the best I could.”

  The Voice laughed, a sound like a lash of ice. “Yes, and that was our great mistake.”

  “What do you mean? What are you talking about?” Ortalis demanded.

  “The best you could do—the best you could do—was not very good,” the Voice said, still laughing that wounding laugh. “It was not good enough to satisfy the stinking Scepter, was it?”

  “No.” Ortalis didn’t want to admit it, but what choice did he have? Failing had been bad enough. Failing with Lanius there to watch him do it was ten times worse. His miserable slug of a brother-in-law … Yet the Scepter of Mercy that refused him accepted Lanius without a qualm. Savagely, Ortalis said, “I should have killed that scrawny bastard while I had the chance!”

  “Oh, now you see wisdom!” The Voice’s sarcasm flayed worse than its laughter. “I suggested this, you will recall, but you did not care to hear me then. Oh, no. You were too good to hear me then. Too good, yes, but not good enough. I told you you would not be. Your best was not good enough, and never will be. Otherwise, I would not have been interested in you. But if you had done your worst, your very worst, you likely would still be King of Avornis today.”

  “I see it,” Ortalis said miserably. “I see everything.”

  “I told your father his successor would not be able to lift the Scepter,” the Voice said. “I told him, but he called me liar. Well, he has gotten what he deserves, and now you are getting what you deserve. I daresay he will have something sharp to tell you when you follow him into that selfsame monastery.”

  “What?” Ortalis yelped. Lanius hadn’t said anything about that when he sent Ortalis into the Maze—a monastery, yes, but not that one. Ortalis hadn’t imagined Lanius could come up with such an ingenious and nasty revenge. “I’d do almost anything not to see my father again.”

  “A little late to worry about it now, don’t you think?” the Voice said. “You can also tell your father-in-law why you failed to recall him. I am sure he will be interested in hearing about that—and about the stripes on his daughter’s back.”

  “Shut up, curse you!” Ortalis cried furiously. No, he didn’t want to see Petrosus, either.

  The Voice laughed. How the Voice laughed! “Your curses are worthless. You break wind with your mouth, little man—nothing more. But I have been well and truly cursed by those who knew exactly what they were doing, and who, catching me unawares and trusting—a mistake I shall never make again—had just the power to send me forth and to maroon me, accursed, in this material world. For believe me, otherwise I would not waste my time on such worms as you.”

  He laughed again, laughed and screamed at the same time. Ortalis woke there at the side of the boat, a cry of horror on his lips. “Shut up, curse you,” said one of the rowers—the same thing Ortalis himself had told the Voice.

  “But the dream—” Ortalis broke off in confusion. The dream was gone now. Here was reality, and was it much better? He discovered he was nodding to himself. Even going to face his father, even going to face Petrosus, was better than facing the being that owned the Voice. Anything was better than that.

  A boot stirred him. “Shut up, I to
ld you. Think you’re still king? Not if you can’t pick up the Scepter, you’re not. Serves you right, by the gods in the heavens!” Was that better than facing the Voice? As a matter of fact, it was.

  Grus’ biggest surprise at the monastery was how little he minded being there. He was busy with either work or prayer most of the day, but the work wasn’t of the sort that would have kept him from thinking. Peeling turnips or washing dishes or chopping firewood didn’t take much in the way of brains.

  Part of him said he should have been figuring out how to escape, how to get back to the city of Avornis, how to put the crown back on his own head. The rest asked a question he’d never asked before he recovered the Scepter of Mercy: Why?

  Before, it would have been a question that got a serious answer. Something always wanted doing, and he’d always been, or seemed to be, the only man who could do it. The nobles of Avornis needed quelling? Who could keep them in line but a strong king? Nobody.

  Dagipert of Thervingia wanted to make Lanius his son-in-law and turn Avornis into a Thervingian puppet kingdom? Again, who could guess what mischief might have sprung from that without a strong king to resist? Nobody.

  Who could beat back the Chernagor pirates? Who could drive the Menteshe out of Avornis’ southern provinces? Was Lanius up to the job? Not likely! Lanius had his virtues, but military prowess wasn’t one of them. He was perhaps the least military King of Avornis of all time. (He would have known whether that was true better than Grus did himself.) If Grus hadn’t tended to such things, who would have? Once more, nobody.

  And there was the Scepter. Lanius was the one who’d thought of using a moncat to get into Yozgat and bring it out. That never would have occurred to Grus, not in a thousand years. But Yozgat lay a long way south of the Stura. Who besides Grus could have taken an Avornan army down to the Menteshe stronghold, besieged it, and given Pouncer the chance to sneak in? Nobody, yet again.

  But now the nobles were cowed, the Thervings quiet, the Chernagors intimidated, the Menteshe divided amongst themselves, even the Banished One beaten for the time being, and the Scepter of Mercy back in the city of Avornis where it belonged.

  All that being so, what did he have left to do?

  He’d had the same thought before, after wielding the Scepter of Mercy against the Banished One. Then, it hadn’t seemed so important. He would go back to the capital—he had gone back to the capital—and pick up the reins again. Whatever came along, he would deal with it. And if it turned out to be less exciting than beating back King Dagipert and less dramatic than recovering the Scepter … well, so what?

  Grus had wondered whether Lanius would try to gather more power into his own hands. He’d never imagined Ortalis would. Royal power wasn’t the sort that had ever interested Ortalis very much. But now that he had it …

  Now that he had it, he was welcome to it, as far as Grus was concerned. If he had great things in him, he could let them out. Grus had trouble imagining that, but life was full of surprises. The brown robe he wore proved that. And if Lanius didn’t care to see his brother-in-law ruling the kingdom in his stead, he could do something about it or not, just as he pleased.

  It’s not my worry, not anymore. That bothered Grus hardly at all. He’d spent a lot of years being worried, and he’d had a lot of important things to worry about. Was he going to get all hot and bothered over whether his son or his son-in-law ended up telling the rest of the Avornans what to do? After fending off King Dagipert, after bringing back the Scepter of Mercy, what difference did something like that make?

  Abbot Pipilo came into the kitchen where Grus was washing supper dishes. “You’re fitting in here better than I thought you would, Brother,” the abbot remarked.

  “Am I? That’s nice.” Grus thought about it for a moment and then said, “This isn’t so bad.”

  “I certainly don’t think so, but then my station was far less exalted than yours,” Pipilo said. “Some of your fellow monks are, ah, surprised you show so little distress at being cast down.”

  Grus knew exactly what that meant—Petrosus was perturbed that he wasn’t weeping and wailing and tearing out chunks of his beard. “It’s not so bad,” he said again. “It’s even—restful in a way, isn’t it? I don’t have to tell anybody what to do, and I know what I have to do myself.”

  The abbot bowed to him. “You will make a good monk,” he declared. “If you outlive me, you may make a good abbot.”

  “I wouldn’t want to,” Grus replied. “I told you—I’ve spent almost my whole life giving orders. Enough is enough.”

  “I wonder if you’ll say that a year from now, when your duties no longer seem like a holiday from kingship.”

  Pipilo was shrewd, no doubt about it. But Grus said, “I think I will. What’s left for me to do back in the city of Avornis? Nothing I can see.”

  “I hope for your sake that you’re right,” the abbot said. “You’ll have an easier time of it if you are. But you’re one of the people I worry about going over the wall. You might manage it, and you might get back to the city of Avornis, too. I don’t say that about many of the men here.”

  “Thank you for the compliment, uh, Father.” Grus was still getting used to that; he hadn’t called anyone Father since laying Crex, his own father, on the pyre. “But even if I did, who would care? Whether it’s Ortalis or Lanius on the throne, he won’t want me back.”

  Pipilo raised an eyebrow. “Some of your followers might.”

  Would Hirundo rise against a king from a younger generation? Would Pterocles? They might possibly, against Ortalis. Against Lanius? Grus found it unlikely. And besides … “How do you know my followers aren’t on the way here, or to another monastery, or in a dungeon, or dead? If you use that kind of broom, you’re smart to sweep out all the dust.” Was Ortalis that smart? Who could guess for certain? Sooner or later, one way or another, Grus would find out.

  With a shrug, Pipilo said, “Well, it will be as it will be,” which no one could possibly argue with. He added, “I am taking up too much of your time,” and went on his way, leaving Grus to the dirty plates and bowls and spoons. Grus shrugged and ran a rag across the next bowl.

  If his calm perplexed the abbot, it really did infuriate Petrosus. And what infuriated Ortalis’ father-in-law even more was the lack of any command releasing him from the monastery. “Your pup is as ungrateful as you are,” Petrosus snarled to Grus.

  The deposed king, walking through the monastery courtyard, paused and bowed to the deposed treasury minister, on his hands and knees in the vegetable garden. “I love you, too, Brother,” Grus said sweetly.

  “I’m not your brother, and I wouldn’t want to be.” Petrosus spat on the pile of weeds he’d uprooted.

  Grus had had a brother, a younger brother, but the other boy had died when he was so young, he hardly remembered him. “Don’t worry,” Grus said. “I don’t want you for one, either. But with these”—he flapped the sleeves of his robe—“it’s not like we’ve got much choice.”

  Petrosus came back with yet another unpleasantry. Before Grus could answer, a sentry on the wall—a wall undoubtedly built more to keep the monks in than to keep intruders out—called, “Who comes?”

  That sent everyone within earshot hurrying toward the gate. Petrosus jumped up from the vegetable plot and pushed past Grus without a harsh word. Grus wondered what was going on, but not for long. They were about to get a new monk, or maybe more than one. And they couldn’t know ahead of time who the new arrivals might be. After all, a king had joined them the last time.

  Whatever answer came from beyond the monastery, that tall, thick wall muffled it. Abbot Pipilo pushed through the crowd of monks. “Let me by, Brothers,” he said. “Let me by. Tending to this is my duty.” When men didn’t get out of the way fast enough to suit him, he wasn’t too holy to move them aside with a well-placed elbow to the ribs.

  He slipped through the inner gate by himself, closed it behind him, and walked up to the portcullis. Grus could hear him p
arleying with the men who brought the new monk or monks. The abbot’s voice rose in surprise, but after a moment he sang out, “Open!”

  Grunting monks turned a capstan. Chain rattled and clanked as it wound around the big wooden drum. Squealing, the portcullis rose. Monks oiled the iron every day to keep it from rusting. They got to leave the monastery. Only men Pipilo trusted had the privilege. Grus wondered if he would ever gain it. In Pipilo’s sandals, he wouldn’t have trusted himself.

  “Close!” the abbot called. The monks grunted again as they bent to the bars of the capstan, although lowering the portcullis was easier work than raising it.

  After the great iron grill thudded home, Pipilo said something else, too low for Grus to follow it. The answering voice was high and furious. Grus stiffened. That couldn’t be … He looked at Petrosus, who also stood there in frozen astonishment.

  But it was. When the gate opened, Pipilo said, “Brothers, I present to you our new colleague and comrade, Brother Ortalis!”

  Now Grus did some elbowing to get to the front of the crowd of monks. “Well, well,” he said to his son. “What brings you here?”

  Ortalis looked harried. Sullenly, he answered, “I couldn’t pick up the miserable Scepter.”

  “Why am I not surprised?” Grus jeered, and then realized he really wasn’t surprised. The Banished One had told him his successor wouldn’t be able to. The exiled god had sworn he was telling the truth. He’d even offered to take oath by his ungrateful descendants, something Grus had never imagined from him. And he hadn’t lied, or not very much. The one thing he hadn’t said was that the man who failed to lift the Scepter of Mercy would be Grus’ long-term successor. Lying by omission was often more effective than coming out and saying that which was not true. Grus knew as much. He also knew he shouldn’t have been surprised to discover the Banished One did, too.

  “You weren’t going to let me have the throne at all,” Ortalis said. “You thought Lord Squint-at-a-scroll would make a better king than I would.”